ikanreed:SpdrJay: If there's anything left at all of Homo Sapiens in even 1 million years I'll be the most surprised dust particle in the universe.

We already made it 1 million years, what so dubious about 2? Nuclear weapons?

Anatomically modern humans are only about 200,000 years old.

In that time our species invented language, then agriculture and domestication, then writing, then arithmetic and geometry, then the printing press, then calculus, then the scientific method, then engineering, then harnessing fossil fuels, then wireless transmission of data, then computers.

Frankly we've come an amazing way just since inventing language. I'd bet before the next 5,000 years are up this species will have transformed itself completely beyond anything we'd recognize today as human.

Suckmaster Burstingfoam:ikanreed: SpdrJay: If there's anything left at all of Homo Sapiens in even 1 million years I'll be the most surprised dust particle in the universe.

We already made it 1 million years, what so dubious about 2? Nuclear weapons?

Anatomically modern humans are only about 200,000 years old.

In that time our species invented language, then agriculture and domestication, then writing, then arithmetic and geometry, then the printing press, then calculus, then the scientific method, then engineering, then harnessing fossil fuels, then wireless transmission of data, then computers.

Frankly we've come an amazing way just since inventing language. I'd bet before the next 5,000 years are up this species will have transformed itself completely beyond anything we'd recognize today as human.

If the Republicans don't screw everything up first, of course.

Republicans are a speed-bump compared to unrestrained monarchy with divine right of kings. The worst they can do is bump the U.S. from a position of international power.

ikanreed:Suckmaster Burstingfoam: Frankly we've come an amazing way just since inventing language. I'd bet before the next 5,000 years are up this species will have transformed itself completely beyond anything we'd recognize today as human.

If the Republicans don't screw everything up first, of course.

Republicans are a speed-bump compared to unrestrained monarchy with divine right of kings. The worst they can do is bump the U.S. from a position of international power.

OK sure, or the Republicans could inspire a worldwide religious war that ends in nuclear holocaust. Or cause a massive ecological catastrophe that sterilizes the planet.

I expect the collapse of civilization to send us back to the stone ages.

Once we break all of our tools it is unlikely for us to climb back up again. All of the easy resources have been used up. Accessing the ones we have now require our current level of technology. If that ability lapses it will be a Mad Max era spiraling down to the Stone Age.

And there isn't anything wrong with that. Life was pretty good back then. Higher mortality rates, but still a good life without so many worries.

Valiente:I always understood that the sun, swollen into a cool (but definitely not cold) red giant, will come to us, boiling away the oceans and stripping off the atmosphere at a fairly predictable rate.

It has been known for a while that the Earth won't be able to sustain liquid water when the sun becomes a red giant. However, more recent research indicates that the sun is slowly warming as it completes its current phase of life, and as a result the ocean will boil away long before then.

If we're honest, the deserts would spread anyway until the surface of earth vaguely resembles mars.. They're already well underway with that processHopefully humanity will have started populating other worlds by then.